On Monday, Canadian transgender internet activist Clara Sorrenti, better known as Keffals, announced that the harassment hub website Kiwi Farms is officially dead.
"After the announcement that Cloudflare would drop Kiwi Farms as a customer, the site came online again with a Russian domain and switched to DDoS-Guard," wrote Keffals. "Less than 24 hours later, DDoS-Guard, a Russian company that specializes in DDoS protection, has also dropped Kiwi Farms. Their Russian domain is now offline, and [founder] Joshua Moon has stated, "I do not see a situation where Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate. It will either become a fractured shell of itself like 8chan, or jump between hosts and domains like Daily Stormer."
This comes just days after NBC correspondent Ben Collins published a devastating exposé of how Kiwi Farms operates — and the security threats and real-world casualties their coordinated trolling and hate speech campaigns have caused.
"For years, there was one site extremist researchers warned me not to cover because publicizing it would be dangerous. But it's time people know KiwiFarms — and how they're chasing political enemies around the world," Collins wrote. "How is KiwiFarms worse than 4chan and 8chan? Three people the site targeted later died by suicide. Why is KiwiFarms more dangerous than any other site? Its far-right userbase abuses all of the private data companies have accrued over the last decade — then weaponizes it against perceived enemies."
According to that report, Kiwi Farms primarily targets transgender people active online, both "doxxing" their personal information and engaging in "swatting," or calling in fake mass casualty events into the houses of victims so heavily armed police raid them — something that happened to Keffals herself.
Prior to that report, Cloudflare had resisted all calls to drop Kiwi Farms; however, this week, they abruptly made the decision to pull the plug.
